


Origins

by redonthefly



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-08
Updated: 2015-03-08
Packaged: 2018-03-16 21:42:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3503780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redonthefly/pseuds/redonthefly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peggy Carter doesn't have an origin story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Origins

Perhaps it’s like this: you are 11 years old, and you stay with your grandparents in the country in the summers. They have a little stone house and a cow, and rolling hills whose soft green grasses hide deep scars in the earth. You’re intrigued by them, the gashes in the fields, where a person can roll down, down, drop below the line of the horizon and that’s where you play.

Sometimes when the days are particularly stifling in their sameness (wake up, drag your grandmother’s old quilt over the unmade bed, milk the cow, eat scones drenched in cream for breakfast, pull on boots if it’s raining, bother the chickens, make believe you are a soldier in the newly muddy trenches, breathe country air) you can convince your grandfather to teach you to shoot.

And if your grandmother isn’t home, he will, puts down his paper and replaces felt wool slippers with cracked Wellies and helps you hoist his rifle onto your shoulder, calloused hands covering yours, the smell of his shaving cream and pipe smoke clinging to his sweater, and battered cans fly off the stone fence one by one.

So perhaps you’re already a crack shot when the whole world goes to hell, and you can’t help it - this is what you made believe your whole life, this is what you’re thinking of when you sign your name on crisp paper in the SOE office; it’s not a rifle, it’s not open sky and it’s not the fading memories of a Great War veteran over coffee and biscuits, but you are here and you are young and capable and you will make something of yourself in this torn up world, you will help it to be whole again.

*

Or perhaps you’re born into it: father and mother agents in the Secret Intelligence Service, which are you are expressly forbidden to know about at all, except that there are men in dark suits sitting in your kitchen, and it’s after midnight and your mother is serving hot tea and your father looks worried, head bent over papers that cover the table.

You are not supposed to know about it at all, except that you do, because you sat in the darkened stairwell with your old nightgown stretched over your knees and leaning into the deepest shadows, and you wouldn’t have been caught, except the shrill whistle of the kettle makes you jump, and you hit your head on the banister and let out a yelp.

They find you, of course. Father drags you into the bright kitchen by your ear and has a silent conversation with your mother while you stand still and proud as you can, 16 and thinking  you are all grown up, willing yourself not to be embarrassed in your too-short nightgown in a room full of strange men.

Your parents have never quite known what to do with you. They send you to bed, but the next day your father pulls you aside and hands you a small book; it’s worn, the spine cracked and a film of fingerprints on every page, and he says “if you’re going to listen in on us, you might as well learn something then, be helpful, eh Peg?”

Years later, you’ll be working at the phone company when the call comes in and your ears prick right up, and before you know it you’re racing down the hall, a bit of paper with transcribed code on it because you’d know that phrase anywhere, you’ve seen it a thousand times in that little book and did they ever make a mistake calling on your line. 

*

Or perhaps you’re an ordinary girl and no one has ever called you extraordinary, and so you don’t really feel like anything in particular: you have a job in a shop and perfectly nice parents who talk about Germany in hushed tones, as though they believe that if they whisper, it will surely not be real. But you’re a perfectly nice girl, and you’re good at your work and a little money is always nice, and so you’re out with your new fella on a Friday night in the summer of ‘38.

It’s a nice night.

It’s nice right until he’s crowded you up in an alley a few blocks from the cinema, and he’s stronger than you and bigger too, and you’re not so much frightened as you are furiously angry, with his hands in your hair, his teeth on your neck, and a hand drifting up your leg.

You’re so angry that you forget to scream, just scrabbling against the brick wall for your grip, leverage, anything to get his hot breath off your skin, when suddenly it isn’t, and while your vision swims a little, you hear the cracking sound of a good hit, then footsteps, and someone’s cool fingers are under your chin.

You look up into the eyes of the tallest woman you’ve ever seen, and she’s staring at you with something like curiosity and intrigue, even while her hands are pressing gently into the bruise you know is coming in under your eye. 

“We’ll need to work on that right hook, I think.” She says, and her accent is American, and her coat is so long that it covers her whole body even though it’s summer; you spit on the pavement to rid the sour taste from your mouth, and follow her without hesitation when she gestures for you to follow her back on the street, saying, “ Come then, we’ll get you patched right up.”

So you follow, because this is the most extraordinary thing that has ever happened to you, (Margaret Carter, 19 years old, works in a shop) and maybe it’s the surge of fury from before, or the swelling on your cheekbone, but you feel alive. Something dormant is waking up, two decades of untapped potential unleashed and coursing through your veins maybe, or it could be adrenaline or fear that you refuse to acknowledge; either way, you match pace with her, right up to the grey door, a nondescript building in a nondescript place.

“Welcome to the SSR,” she says, pushing it open. “Phillips! I need a bag of ice!”

*

It could be these, or it could be none. You might have been a little girl with a good eye and better aim and a grandfather who looked at you and saw everything tender and wild and fierce about you; you might have been the daughter of an aristocrat spy who taught his only daughter to solve his puzzles, being wholly unable to keep her in the dark; you might have been so incensed that you forgot to scream to save yourself, so appalled that anyone would try to take advantage of you that you let yourself be led by a stranger into a world that would become even bigger than you imagined.

Perhaps you were.

Perhaps you wanted to save the world.

Perhaps you wanted to right the injustices. Aid the weary. Command respect.

It doesn’t matter, because you will, you are.

You do.

  
  



End file.
